Perez Hilton Charms New York
Perez Hilton Charms New York
by Paolo Mastrangelo
Last night Paolo Mastrangelo went up to the Borders in the Columbus Circle shops, where Perez Hilton read and spoke before hundreds of fans. 95% were college age; easily 80% were women. Everyone looked like an edgy Gap commercial, which is to say, they all looked really good. There was not a flannel shirt, neon orange backpack or fanny pack in sight. But it wasn’t really the outfits that were striking-it was all the smiles and excitement in the room. Perez was behind a podium. He was cheerful, and graciously took questions from all. “What do you think about blogging in relation to journalism?” someone asked. And: “When did you come out to your friends and family?” And: “What do you think about the failed gay marriage bill in the New York Senate?” After two bathroom breaks, two Red Bulls and signing 200+ copies of his book True Bloggywood Stories and taking pictures with nearly everyone-with a smile on his face the whole time-Perez packed it up and went, we presume, to go check on his blog.
Someone should tell him it's available on DVD.

“It’s ridiculous for someone to send my Facebook post. You guys are trying to make a mountain out of a molehill.”
–Arlington, TN, mayor Russell Wiseman is upset that someone shared a private Facebook message in which he wrote that “Ok, so, this is total crap, we sit the kids down to watch ‘The Charlie Brown Christmas Special’ and our muslim president is there, what a load…..try to convince me that wasn’t done on purpose. Ask the man if he believes that Jesus Christ is the Son of God and he will give you a 10 minute disertation (sic) about it….w…hen the answer should simply be ‘yes’….”
Spaaaaaaaaaaaace
Got a couple hundred grand lying around? There’s still time to book passage on Richard Branson’s space shuttle. It sounds fun, lemme know how it is.
Diane Savino Still Awesome

“Are you the type who says you won’t get married till your gay friends can get married, too?
No. I think the likelihood is that they’ll get married before I do.”
-Your new favorite state senator talks to the folks at New York.
How many times can you write "Is this the end of Berlusconi?"

Thousands of demonstrators will gather in Rome tomorrow for “No Berlusconi Day,” where they will demand that the Italian Prime Minister resign his office. That probably won’t do anything to get rid of him, but maybe the rumored mob ties, the two corruption trials, and the sudden financial worries he is experiencing will prove more effective.
Tea Cosy!

“A tea cosy is a marvelous household item that does not suffer modernisation well. A good tea cosy should be cosy itself, such as this East London flea market find that quite obviously embodies many well-spent nights of fireside knitting. Slip one over a favorite pot and bask in the warmth of the thought that in the time it takes to finish its satisfying contents, thousands of disappointing sips of room temperature tea will be taken all over the world.”
It’s a little sad how much joy I get from Fantastic Man’s daily recommendations.
Elements of Stale, with Luke Mazur: Sister, You're A Poet
by Luke Mazur

So last Sunday I read an op-ed in the Times, where some dude argues in favor of Catholic priests saying Mass, while facing the direction opposite of the congregation. Now, this op-ed was most wacky to me not because of anything inherently awkward about facing away from the people you’re talking to. (But, yes.) Or because Kenneth J. Wolfe assumes that there is very much of a congregation these days not to face. (Ha, I think.) But because I remember learning back in high school that the Catholic Church had already reversed this practice once before.
We once learned that the Second Vatican Council reformed some of the institution’s more antiquated practices; opened its windows and let some fresh air in. We learned that Vatican II was the Church growing its hair out, the Church’s version of modernizing. More accurately, it seems, it was the Church catching up to Galileo. And, this time, not condemning him. But for a Church that recently elevated a former member of the Hitler Youth to its highest post, change does have a funny definition.
Some people hated these reforms. Some people, like the current Pope, or the villains from The Da Vinci Code, or Maureen Dowd’s mom, devoted their lives to reversing them. Others more quietly protested. Sister Edith, the librarian at my grade school, for example, chose to wear her habit, even as most of the other nuns in the building had by that point updated to something more akin to Pat Nixon’s modestly stylish wardrobe. Those Republican cloth coats-well, Richard Nixon would happily tell the sisters that they looked good in whatever the hell they wore, especially if that meant they’d vote for him. It’s probably safe to say that many of them did, in fact, vote for this man three times. Still, no habit for these Rockefeller Republicans.
For whatever reason, at Kolbe Catholic, “library” was not only a room with bookshelves full of copies and copies of Dear Mr. Henshaw, but also a class that met once a week. We called Library, along with with Art, and Music and Gym and Computers, “specials.” Special, as in, a break from our regular classes and regular teachers. In Library, Sister Edith taught us how to find books using the Dewey Decimal system and how to look up answers in an encyclopedia. And because she was old and wore a cape on her head, and we were 8 and this was a “special,” these skills would be forgotten even before technology made them obsolete.
But Sister also, bizarrely enough, taught us about poetry. We wrote haiku on snowball cut-outs during winter and limericks on shamrock cut-outs during Lent. And around the calendar, we wrote cinquains. That five line poem seemed to be appropriate no matter the season. The variant we were taught was a twenty-two syllable, constructed from a third grader’s vocabulary that could adorn the hallways no matter the month. The first line was just a noun, a naming word. The second line, just two adjectives, or descriptive words. For the third, three words that express action (verbs, if you will); and on the fourth, four words that express feeling (perhaps more verbs, a phrase even). The last line was just another word that re-states the first one. A tag. Here are some examples.
According to a website that appears to be designed for parents who home-school their children, a good cinquain “commands attention to word choice, word meaning, syllabication, and parts of speech, while at the same time expressing a meaningful message.”
Good cinquains, it seems, are tweets.
It is clear now that in 2009, the year that Twitter finally replaced newspapers, writing cinquains was probably the most pertinent of our Library lessons. Sister, despite the books and the film strips, so old that she was edentulate, helped to cut our new media incisors. And Ken Wolfe who, according to his byline, “writes frequently for traditionalist Roman Catholic publications” and who wants priests facing the wall? Well, I can only make assumptions regarding his politics, but even for Kenneth, 2009 might’ve been the year when the pound sign evolved from terrorist fist jab to hashtag. #imsorry
Previously: The Text
Luke Mazur is getting really comfy at his parents’ place up in Buffalo.
Little Lost Pony "Like A Giant Dog"
Do you have any information about the owner of this little lost pony who was found wandering the streets of Southern California? Help a pony out!
On Heating Meat

Someday soon we will be able to safely eat burgers composed of bits of dozens of different ground-up cows as well as their feces
, because the cows themselves will be immune to E. coli! Thanks to vaccines, and ingenuity. And no thanks to “bureaucratic delays in Washington.” Those fatcats! Again! So all the problems are now basically solved except for the solving.
Very Recent History: A Dispiriting End To An Earlier Decade
This weekend, Sunday, December 6th, marks the 40th anniversary of Altamont, the free concert the Rolling Stones put on at a speedway outside San Francisco to end their U.S. tour in 1969. It was meant to be like Woodstock. At a press conference before the event, Mick Jagger said, “It’s creating a sort of microcosmic society which sets example to the rest of America as to how one can behave in large gatherings.” More than 300,000 people attended. But things went very wrong. Hired as security, but full of acid and beer, the Hells Angels motorcycle club were not on the same blissed-out flower-children vibe as much of the crowd. Rather, they beat people with leaded pool cues.
The heaviest violence occurred right in front of the stage. In the worst of it, a horrible moment captured on film by Al and David Maysles, who were shooting footage for their documentary Gimme Shelter (which, if you have not seen, by all means do: it is the best movie ever made about rock n’ roll), 18-year-old Meredith Hunter was stabbed to death after pulling out a gun. Music journalist Stanley Booth witnessed the incident and wrote about it in his book The True Adventures of the Rolling Stones (which is florid and nasty, and one of the best books ever written about rock n’ roll).
“There was a sudden movement in the crowd at stage left. I looked away from Mick and saw, with that now familiar instant space around him, bordered with falling bodies, a Beale Street nigger in a black hat, black shirt, iridescent blue-green suit, arms and legs stuck out at crazy angles, a nickle-plated revolver in his hand. The gun waved in the lights for a second, two, then he was hit, so hard, by so many angels, that I didn’t see the first one-short, Mexican-looking, the one who had led me onstage?-as he jumped. I saw him as he came down, burying a long knife in the black man’s back. Angels covered the black man like flies on a stinking carcass. The attack carried the victim behind the stack of speakers, and I never saw him again.”
The concert has since become symbolic of the end of the ’60s, the day the hippie dream melted into a bad, bad trip.